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Blizzard Titan domination?
Astoran
Member Posts: 27
So I know Blizzards next mmo is likely pretty far off but what effect do you think it will have on the soon to come releases such as GW2 and SWTOR? Assuming one of these new titles does really well and builds a substantial subscriber base, will Blizzard just snatch them right back with their new release?
I guess what I am asking is do you think a game like GW2 (if it becomes successful) will have enough pull to keep players from leaving? I personally think that Blizzard's influence is simply too strong for these newer games to compete with even if they do end up being very good games, but what does everyone else think?
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People are already leaving WOW now so Blizzard either has to make their next expansion nearly perfect in order for fans to stay or they simply can keep on doing what they have been doing and make Titan the best it can be. The thing is though that we have no idea what Titan is so , who knows ?
Why would I play Titan when I can play Firefall for free?
My theme song.
I'm starting to doubt whether Blizzard has still the ingenious talent left to equal their former successes, especially with the growing Activision/Kotick influence that permeates more and more of Blizzard's game design decisions.
But one thing that Blizzard has that trumps anything else, and that is money: if things aren't right with a game of theirs, they make enough money to create 2 big budget AAA MMO titles with the cash they make with 1 month of WoW subs.
So they can go all out in game design or improvements of existing MMO's if the situation requires them to. No other company or dev team can do that.
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The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I've been saying this for a while now, but I'm going to keep saying it so it's on record all over the net.
Blizzard is going to gear Titan to -replace- WoW. They have said that it won't compete with their current huge title, but they have also said that WoW has reached the limits of what they can do with their existing architecture. They have also said that they expect to see a decline in subscription numbers, but WoW will remain extremely profitable for at least ten years (I consider this an optimistic assessment, but that's just me).
Blizzard is well aware that while they have had amazing success with WoW they have also created an industry segment that is millions strong and is very quickly growing bored with the current MMO formula. Blizzard is in a position right now to do something completely different from WoW and they would be stupid not to. One thing Blizzard is not, is stupid. Every move they have made was in anticipation of what people wanted to see.
Titan is going to replace WoW as their major title. They can't continue to try to tack crap onto WoW because it's already starting to wear thin. They might try to tool a new engine, but the risks involved with such a sweeping change are too heavy to risk right now. They'd be better off to allow WoW to continue it's course and very slowly diminish over time while the game continues to print money for them. Titan -will- be the next super huge title to hit the market or Blizzard is going to find itself removed from that market very quickly.
This isn't a fanboi prediction. I like Blizzard, but not enough to do something like this out of blind faith or adoration. Blizzard is perhaps the smartest studio out there in terms of figuring out what people want, then delivering it. They are in the position right now to take as long as they want with Titan and they can spend obscene amounts of money on it if they wanted to. Titan is really going to be the test of whether or not Blizzard maintains dominance in the market. They can only do that with some drastic change. This isn't a love letter, it's an educated guess based on Blizzards' track record of feeling out the pulse of gamers.
And do you actually know what the codename Titan stands for or even know what type of MMORPG it might become?
I do think that both sides, that's Blizzards fanbase aswell BLizzard haters might be equally curious as to what BLizzard is developing.
I never played Blizzard games fully before WoW, just a few runs with Warcraft but at the time C&C was more my thing and played WoW off/on till BC and left 2 weeks after BC was live to never have returned but I am very curious to what they might bring with this "Titan" MMORPG they are developing.
It will have no bearing on GW2 or SWToR... Blizzards new MMO (Code name Titan) will be a facebook game, just saying. I got my sources.
It's not so much that Blizzard's influence is too stron but more of there is about crap for alternatives besides WoW. Blizzard's "Titan" is going to be Sci-Fi so that might not appeal to some or many. There is a major heated debate of if it's an FPS MMO (which I read on Wiki or somewhere where they said it was) or if it's an MMORPG. Some might quite frankly be done with Blizzard especially after their latest fiasco.
Few tid bits though
1. There is only a few mill subs in NA.
2. EU also has a few mill subs.
3. Majority of subs are in Asia.
Their foothold is NA is not as strong as many think it is, nor in EU. If Blizzard can totally rennovate their MMO model then yeah I think they'll put a lot of pressure on the other MMOs. However if they stick to the same ol' same ol' then I don't see how it'll be much of a threat to the other innovative MMOs.
Maybe part of the problem is that their predecessor's are no longer on the WoW team anymore or if so very few of em left to the point that they have no real influence over it. They all have either left the game or are working on the "Titan" project. While I am ptolly done with Blizzard, I do hope "Titan" captures some of the old feeling of WoW that is non-existant now since they do have some of their WoW creators on the "Titan" team.
Yeah because firefall and titan are exactly the same.Lol!!
I'm wondering, as my sig implies, how different can Titan be? Blizzard's main customers will be their wow base but I think by that point even more people will be so burnt on WoW that logging in and seeing WoW in space or post apocalypse WoW will be too much.
The reason people stick so long with WoW and don't venture to the clones or indies or consoles or real life is because you have so much time invested in this character. You have your gold, mounts, pets, achievements,, flightpaths, friends, knowledge.
Quitting an MMO and staying quit is a hard thing to do. WoW's best friend is attatchment and Titan won't have that. I doubt Titan will fail but I think after Warcraft expires (no matter how long after Titan's release that is, a day, a year, or 3) there will be no more mmo king by such a large margin.
Or i'm wrong and Titan will be a revolutionary and amazing experience.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Yes, I think Blizzard will snatch them right back with the release of Titan. In the case of GW2, it doesn't hurt them so much financially since they are not subscription based. They will be making their money up front with the box and expansion sales. Titan isn't coming out for another 3 years so by then GW2 will have made their money and then some. I don't see it affecting them at all. I don't see anyone right now being affected by Titan financially because it's just so far from release. 3 years from now most people playing Rift or GW2 or SWTOR will most likely be bored by it anyway and ready to try the next title. I think it's more likely that any game releasing 6 months or so prior to Titan in 2014 would be in for a rough ride. But I don't see any major game company shortsighted enough to release a title that close to Titan's release.
Lets take a trip down memory lane shall we? Remember when WoW first came out? how buggy it was, servers crashing lag all over the place. it was a disaster, lots of down time while they patched. but back then there wasnt many MMOs to compete with and the old school ones were to hard core for all the new players trying to join the MMO genre.
So people stuck it out with WoW.
fast forward to todays mentality of gamers, and if Titan isnt a perfect launch, it will crash and burn just like the rest of the AAA games out there that failed to deliver. I dont care who makes the game blizzard will learn the hard way if they dont release a " ready " game at launch.
That is true, DrunkWolf, people are far less tolerant of game problems then they were back then. But then again...maybe not less tolerant but certainly more vocal and impatient. After all, there are still plenty of active titles right now that have been on the market for a year or MORE and are still very buggy and experiencing crashes, etc, but people still play them and pay (e.g. Darkfall, Mortal Online)
Actually Wow was one of the smoother launches. There weren't very many bugs or server crashes, just an annoying loot bug. The biggest problem was the queu.
Venge
Of course, WoW spent longer on production than many modern mmo's.
Hilarious, kind of, because I think they do things as quickly as they can because they fear someone will blow the market away with a great innovative awesome game that noone else can compete with.
Fear not developers, noone is doing anything new, just make good graphics and you'll be fine.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
The Activision influence really makes me wonder. Will Blizz be able to deliver "polish" this time around? No doubt they have buckets of cash to pour into development but will their business model let them do it?
They really scary part is, if WoW is losing subs, people who have only played WoW, how are they going to effect newer games if they decide to jump? The WoW community now is horrible, and my gut feeling is there is going to be a big jump to SW:TOR. The sad part is, WoW's community wasn't always that way. When I first played in Nov. of 05, there wasn't much difference between WoW's community and everybody else. Just something I've been thinking about I guess.
What is Titan? And if you don't know anything about it, how the heck can you say it will dominate anything? Brand association?
Brand association and Blizzards experience with releasing top quality very popurlar and profitable games. They've had what... one game that wasn't a smash hit?
Venge
Blizzard is famous for aiming at the casual market and advertising well. No matter how bad their games can be, their brand name will make it a success. That's how WoW became popular, brand name, the gameplay itself wasn't anything special. I assume it'll work again.
Darkfall Travelogues!
Their brand name only sold half a million copies or so at launch, worse that AOC, war or STO. Would of mouth about the game being fun and advertising caused the population to rise and it being a good game caused the population to stay high.
Brand name only gives you the start.
Venge
edit - I"m one of those ones that have actually never played any other blizzard game. I came to WoW a week or so after launch cause of friends.
Er... STO and AoC are NEW MMOs after the genre has been inflated. Their sales numbers mean little, especially when you take into account how badly they flopped post launch. WoW, when it started was largely glossed over by the MMORPG fanbase. But, it had been heavily advertised for about a year prior to launch, and it found its audience with RTS players and FPS players and casuals and people who had never played an MMO. They thought it was great because, almost everyone enjoys their first MMO no matter how unoriginal or flawed it is, and spread the word to other people who had never played MMOs.
Blizzard's name brand is what drew that first crowd of people in, without that, WoW would never have taken off.
Darkfall Travelogues!
I agree it drew the first crowd.
But they would still be a very successfull game because adverstising drew others, and word of mouth said it was a good fun game. The game would have still grown and been enormously successfull.
Brand name only gets you so far. STO, War, AoC had brand name and had a larger initial pull. However their numbers dropped because the game wasn't as fun.
Blizzards was, thats why it grew and continued to grow for so many years.
and no not everyone that came in was new. My friends weren't and neither am I. The game was/is just fun - more fun than we were currently having in HZ, EQ or EQ2.
Venge
The Blizzard and Warcraft brand is NOTHING compared to LOTR/StarWars/The Matrix... WoWs success was word of mouth, and that is why it became pop culture.
SWTOR can't depend on it's IP either. It will need to prove it where it counts - Gameplay.
Well yes, we agree, brand name gives it that start up, which is the hardest part.
Darkfall Travelogues!
It's funny you said that. IME, the hardcore EQ1 players I knew decided to go WOW rather than EQ2. And it's my recollection that many hardcore EQ1 players were headed to WOW.
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